


Close To The Ground

by carlizzlerose



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Alternate Universe - High School, Multi
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-04-01
Updated: 2014-06-17
Packaged: 2018-01-17 18:38:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 7,202
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1398355
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/carlizzlerose/pseuds/carlizzlerose
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Being a kid and growing up. It's hard and nobody understands."</p><p>Dirk Strider lives in Los Angeles. His brother makes movies, his best friend has a bitter taste that never leaves her tongue and he sees more of the world than he likes to say he sees. Sometimes he feels like lightning would if thunder never sounded, but it does, and so he goes to school instead. Because even bitterness can taste sweet sometimes, brothers can get weekends off, and all sight, with time, can go dark.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Growing Up

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Preface Part I: Childhood is weird. Dirk's involves a thinking game, a polaroid camera, a parent teacher conference, and a lot of weird metaphors.

When we were nine years old, I held her hands in both of mine and made her close her eyes and fall back into the dark of her own mind. She would grin I would spin her, fast enough to let my  feet stumble over each other as I turned around myself, fast enough to let her stomach whirl inside itself with the velocity of force. 

When we were done, I let her go, and she would fly against the grass, back hitting the soft ground. Whether she couldn't breathe because the slam had knocked the wind out of her or because she was quiet and suffocating when she laughed, I never figured out. I did know that at nine years old, it was easy to see the bits of dirt and grass caught in her blonde bob, and know she'd be picking them out for the rest of the evening. 

I'd try to pull her back up to her feel with an apology on my lips, but she'd shake my hands away, happier to lie there on the grass than get back up to her feet. When were nine years old, catching her breath was letting go of the laughter.

My brother would come outside with his sunglasses pushed all the way up the bridge of his nose and call us in for snack. He was twenty one years old and when I was nine years old, I didn't have the capacity to understand the things he could. If Roxy was the way that air thinned close to the ground, then Dave was the way heat rose and made things stuffy at high altitudes. He was always just above me. He towered over me back then; I fit right under his palm. He'd ruffle my hair or put a hand on my shoulder and I knew how strong he was, and the feeling of that hand on my shoulder liked to linger there, no matter how long he was gone. 

My brother made movies, but Los Angeles was a big city, and driving from Westchester to Burbank every morning meant he was gone by the time my alarm woke me up in the mornings. My next door neighbor, Jane, went to the same local school as me, the one with the aqua painted rods that held up the extended rooftops over the classrooms that I liked to swing around, letting my hands squeak against the finished paint. Jane's father, who I knew only by the name Mr. Crocker, would knock on my door at eight in the morning and take us for donuts before school. I always got one with white frosting and pink sprinkles and let Roxy beg me for half of it every morning before pretending to give in and let her have the whole thing. I didn't like donuts, but I liked to see her smile.  

* * *

 

And my brother made movies, so when I started fourth grade, I had to recall his hand on my shoulder to get me through the classroom doors. I didn't smile for my school pictures, and after the fourth year bringing home big manilla folder with 8x11s of amber eyes staring deadpanned into the camera lens, Dave sat me down and I thought he was going to ask me why I wasn't smiling, but instead he dropped the envelope on the coffee table and pushed his sunglasses up to the top of his head. The lenses mussed his short, shaggy hair, white blonde and  surprisingly cooperative. He rubbed at his eyes before he released them in my favor. His were hazel; green on the outside that faded into a burnt brown. When he wore dark colors, there was a radiant tinge to them, though sometimes I wondered if I mistook the sleepless redness of the whites of his eyes for a ring of the violent color I believed hung just outside his irises. Mine were auburn, burn brown throughout and not inclined to glow. 

"Can you do me a favor, kid?" He leaned down on his elbows so I was at eye level with him from my seat on the floor, and elbow of my own resting on the coffee table, one edge of the packet brushing against my pale skin. I shrugged in response, and he took that as confirmation. 

"I want you to go ahead and list five things you don't like." I looked up at him and frowned, trying to find some portrait of what he might be getting at in those sunflower eyes, but he didn't give me any hints.

"Anything five things?"

"Anything at all, Dirk."

It was a big question. I didn't like to admit it at nine years old, but there were already a lot of things I didn't like about the world. Not in the way I feel like I see things now, the universally misanthropic feeling that sometimes settles itself in my chest and lingers, but in the little ways you feel things when you're young. I didn't like the way the teachers frowned at students when they didn't understand things, I didn't like the way some of my classmates laughed when a kid messed up at handball, I didn't like how I wasn't allowed to read in the middle of class when I was done with my work. And there were other things, but when you're young, you don't let yourself comprehend them. You start journals with the intention of getting all your thoughts out, but when it comes down to talking about the things that make you uncomfortable, the idea of putting them into ink and tangibility makes them feel heavy and concrete and you get as paranoid as a nine year old can become. I never wrote in a journal for more than a couple weeks before giving up on them. I didn't like journals. 

But Dave was waiting, so I gave him the best answer I could while appearing preoccupied with my apple juice box. 

"I don't like Jane's cat, I don't like how the teachers try and make you do multiplication as fast as you can because the kids end up just memorizing the answers rather then just doing the work. I don't like it when you wait at traffic lights too long even when the lights are changing, because we should just be going somewhere. I don't like the Indiana Jones theme, and I don't like burritos." 

I don't have to look up at Dave to know I've said something wrong. He's twenty one, but he ages fast the longer he sits there rubbing at his eyes, which I see in my peripherals. I don't have to look at him to know he understands something I don't get yet. 

I suck the rest of my juice out until the sound of straw searching for liquid in the empty box squeals through the quiet, and he moves to take the box from me. 

"Try to give us a smile next year, little man. The whole emo kid thing is great and I dig your commitment, but I've gotta mail these to people. If you don't start looking happy, they're gonna question how I'm bringing you up." 

I shrug again, because I've already spoken a lot in the conversation. He takes his leave, and I lift the envelope of the coffee table and kick it under the couch. 

* * *

 

I got good at not frowning. I perfected the art of silly faces, sticking my tongue out or pulling at the inside of my lip, hooking my finger around and bringing the skin  back towards my cheek. Roxy got a tiny polaroid camera for her tenth birthday that printed out inch big photos with sticky backings, so she spent winter break taking photos of me with all my various funny faces and sticking the good ones all over her binders and the back of her bedroom door. 

I couldn't hang out with her inside her house because she was a girl and her mom was a girl and since her dad wasn't really around back then, I wasn't ready to be the only man in the house, according to her. LA had relatively warm winters, so we could still sit outside in 70 degree weather as she flipped through her photos, cupping her hand like a visor around her forehead to block the glare and make out my distorted face. I laid back in the grass while she played with the metallic colored flaps on either side of the photograph, rounded and adorned with little patterns of planets and hearts and other geometrical objects. 

"Distri, you look so ugly." She laughed, and I knew she was joking, but I hoisted myself up to lean on my elbows all the same, just enough to look at her without straining my neck.

"What?" 

"Look." She shoved the photographs towards me and I had to agree with her; in every depiction, I made some sort of awful face. I didn't look cool and I didn't look happy. I just looked weird. 

"It's ironic." I quoted the words I'd heard my brother say on the phone, arguing with his collaborative team.

"It's i... what?" Roxy's vocabulary was rife with words like mitochondria and seismograph and halitosis, but I had to roll onto my side to explain what, to me, felt like common knowledge. 

"It's like when something looks like it means something, but it really means something else. Like, when you like something because nobody else does, not even you. Or when you say something you don't mean, like when you're being sarcastic."

"Okay." She dragged out the vowels in the word and I could tell she didn't really get it. To her, I was just making faces and they all looked ugly, ironic or not. By the time Christmas came around and Dave brought out his video camera for the annual Strider home movie session, I'd returned to refusing to smile into the lens. 

* * *

 

I got all fours in academics in fourth grade, because back in elementary school, they graded you on a scale of one to four. At the June parent-teacher conferences, all the kids with good grades got in and out fast, so it wasn't so bad. The trouble kids had longer meetings, and they had to sit outside on the bench for up to an hour while their the teachers went over all the reasons the kids were getting the grades they were getting. I didn't expect to be outside for long, so while Roxy brought her DS and messed around with Mario, I tapped my foot to the beat of her stylus against the touch screen and waited patiently for Dave to finish up sweet talking my teacher so I could get home. 

The shortest conference ran about fifteen minutes, and the rest were only a bit longer than that. Several went on at once, depending on which class a student had. Roxy and I weren't in the same class that year, so while my brother was inside, her mom met with the other teacher. 

When twenty minutes passed and Ms. Lalonde came back out to find her daughter, I frowned and sat up straighter. Roxy had done just as well as me in some subjects, but I had a perfect report card. I shuffled in my seat, craning my neck not to try and peek in through the window to see what was taking my brother, but they were darkened from the outside, so I couldn't see anything. In resignation, I slumped back down against the bench, waiting for my turn to leave. 

Ten minutes passed. My chest got tighter. The crowd of kids in the courtyard had thinned out significantly; many groups of parents and students had gone in and left. A few of the fourth grade teachers were already through with their meetings. Most of those who's name followed Strider in alphabetical order sat around with bored expressions on their faces, but a select few sat with accusatory expressions. Ten year olds did not excel in the art of subtlety. By the time I'd brought myself to avoid their looks and direct my stare straight down at the floor, it'd been another ten minutes.

When the door opened, my heart leaped to my throat and I stood up, getting ahead of myself in my eagerness to flee the embarrassment of attention. Dave was speaking with my teacher in a quiet voice, and I couldn't actually see if the expression on his face was angry, but in my head, I assumed it was. When he came over and clapped me on the shoulder, his hand felt too strong for once, and I felt too small. It took effort not to shrink back.

"What was that?"

"Talk in the car."

The bluntness of his statement didn't do much to quell my nerves, so I just shut up and let him lead me off to what I presumed was my execution. He didn't say anything, just kept his hand on my shoulder and pushed the shades back up to the bridge of his nose. The warm wind blew, and since this was before the days of gel and styling, my fair wavy hair blew into my eyes. I didn't bother pushing it away. 

He opened the back door of the SUV for me and I clambered in, the black vehicle encompassing. I crawled all the way across the seats with the express intention of sitting behind him, hoping if he couldn't see my face, he wouldn't be able to prove I was guilty of anything, and then I couldn't be punished. 

I guess in those days, I blamed Dave for a lot of shit like that. Whenever I felt like something was going wrong, I always assumed he was going to make it worse. In retrospect, maybe it was a dick move to assume the worse as a ten year old. He was my brother, and he was doing the best he could with a situation he hadn't asked for. It wasn't his fault I was so afraid of everything. 

I just acted like it must have been. 

"Do you wanna sit up front, kid?" He turned himself all the way around in his seat to look at me through the darkened lenses of his shades. I shrugged my shoulders, and then clicked my seatbelt into place to show I was committed to my choices. He shrugged back and turn around, starting the car up and getting us out of the parking lot.

Things were very quiet. Usually, the first thing he did in the car was crank up some rap station, or I'd throw something at him until he remembered to. But I didn't feel like being pushy. In fact, I wanted to be entirely unremarkable, enough to sink down into the black leather upholstery and disappear completely. Quiet meant thinking, and thinking meant there was something to think about, and I didn't want Dave to be thinking about anything after a parent teach conference. 

I tried to remember if this is how it had gone last year, but I couldn't. That was frustrating, and I sunk down into my seat to avoid getting angry with myself, which is something I struggled with back then. Too often would he have to come pry me  out from where I'd hidden underneath my bed, or encourage me down from a tree. Admittedly, that hadn't happened since I was eight or so, but the anger was still there, reverberating inside me quietly. It was more dangerous this way; more attractive. I believed wholly that it was controllable, that no one noticed my struggling except for me. I was convinced, though whether I wanted to be right or not, I'm not sure. 

It took until we were halfway through Playa del Rey on our way back for him to speak up. 

"Really good grades, bro. How did you get all the fucking brains?" 

Another shrug. I might as well not have responded at all for all he could see with his back to me. 

"And you've had a nice teacher. Real sweetheart. You like her class?" 

This time, I really did decide not to acknowledge him. 

Whether he had nothing left to say or just decided not to say it, my apathetic appearance was far from aligned with the reality of my interest. All I wanted was for him to spill about what happened in that damn room, but doing that would mean subjecting myself to the possibility of getting in trouble, and that wasn't worth it to me. 

He came up to me later and thrust a bag of chips in front of my face like some sort of peace offering. I took it from him warily and put my Hot Wheels down, tearing open the vulnerable plastic to get into the Ruffles. Dave kneeled beside me and picked up a small red car, spinning the wheels with his fingers as he waited for me to get comfortable. 

He was always like that, patient with me. Sometimes it felt like time was in his control, like the hours all moved and shifted to his command. He was never late and didn't seem to mind waiting, always finding something to comment on or talk about in the stiller moments of life. I envied that about him, because the calmer he was, the more wired I became. I was young, and even then I understood that the heat rose around Dave because temperature wanted to be close to him, and so did I. For all the grief I gave him, I think I knew my brother was all I had.

So I shoved a couple chips in my mouth and gave him a look that let him know: this time, I was listening. 

"The teacher wanted to talk to me about your behavior in class, so that's what took forever. She said you'd been aggressive with other kids, do you know what she's talking about?" 

"Nah."

"Do you know what she's talking about, Dirk?"

I shrugged my shoulders, but I did know. I was small and kids liked to push me around. Sometimes I pushed back. If I told on them in the first place, they would have been the ones to get the bad rep for it, but I didn't. So they just had to wait until they'd provoked me, and I'd snap at them. Every time. I didn't want to tell Dave any of that. 

He put his hand on my shoulder, almost as if to keep it down and stop me from lying to him with my shrugs. I slumped them down. Sometimes his hands felt strong, like they were what might be holding my young body together, but right now it burned through my grey shirt. It felt too heavy and I couldn't breathe right. It made me wonder why I was so angry with him, and why I couldn't be cool and collected and command time like he could. I wanted to know why some deity or scientific reasoning or whatever the hell had allowed me to grow up with someone so superior to me, what sick pleasure could be derived in making someone feel so lacking in comparison.

I wanted to know the the fuck my parents were. 

* * *

 

That night, I snuck out the backdoor, my head still heavy from the crying I'd done. I was ten years old, but I was starting realize I could hate myself. It felt more like embarrassment in those day, embarrassment for crying in front of Dave, for putting that frown on his face like I was something he couldn't fix. It took twenty minutes and ten blocks to find Roxy's bedroom window, but when I tapped on it, her surprised expression lit the other side, and for the first of many times, she let me in. 

She held my hand and stayed silent as I tried to keep my eyes from swimming. Neither of us had stayed up that late outside of New Years, and I felt like I couldn't breathe. 

I was close to the ground. 

 


	2. Aloe Vera

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Preface Part II: Middle school comes, and thankfully, goes. Life involves codependency, a nightmare, a text message, a bicycle pump, and a pair of purple swim trunks.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "Aloe Vera" or "Just a Hint of Timing" is brought to you by a collective 58 plays on various The Dear Hunter songs. Seriously, that band is my driving source of inspiration. 
> 
> This is #2 of 3 prefacing chapters. I promise that with chapter 4 will come the actual goodies of the story, but these "growing up" chapters are important, so enjoy them while they last. I also promise that chapter 3 will come much faster. Summer is a blessing. 
> 
> Big thank yous to Adrian and Kris for fueling my inspiration with their wonderful imaginations. And more thank yous to those who commented on the last chapter! I hope you like this one just as much. Comments keep me motivated, so please let me know what you think if you think something worth letting me know about! 
> 
> That's all. Run wild, kids. xx  
> Carly

By the time I was thirteen, I'd grown out of my aggression. I joined the junior robotics team at the middle school, and I think that helped me channel some of the emotions I didn't know how to handle. 

And for three years, that was my family. My home away from home. It didn’t matter what burns from sparks or cuts from slipping hands I got, in fact, I was happy to have them. They were a good thing. On nights where I’d sit bent over my blueprints or strain my eyes on figuring the small fixings of some robotic contraption, the shocks were what brought me back to reality, what snapped me out of my own expansive head in my small bedroom, neat save for the mess of technical material spread over the hardwood that’d been put in place sometime before I met sixth grade. 

Especially then, I needed things to bring me back. I know now that I am prone to hurtling, to spinning and then crashing somewhere out of sight, and in moments like those, it’s always left to me to pick myself up and brush myself off and assess the damage done. I know now that something like robotics prevented it from getting bad while my mind was still attempting to grow and develop and make something sane and stable of itself. I know now that when there was no robotics team in high school, no driving force behind what I’d determined at that point must have been the closest thing to passion I had, that also meant there was nothing to bring me back in again when I was reeling. There were people, but people were different. People tried their best, but only electricity or incision could break me from who I was and bring me back to who I knew I had to be for everyone’s sake.

* * *

 

In middle school, Roxy ended up at my house every night in one way or another. Sometimes she'd sneak in through the backdoor. Other nights she'd arrive with permission, hitching a ride with our carpool and showing up with me, her backpack slung over one shoulder. When she couldn't find a way out of her own house, my phone would chirp with her text tone into the early hours of the morning. Sometimes she'd talk me into video chatting, but as it were, my matured eighth grade self was starting to grow out of instant messaging applications.

From what I could tell, Dave didn't mind. When she was there, she got along with him just about as well as she got along with me. She fit in at the dinner table like the seat next to mine wasn’t meant to be empty, and made us laugh like clinking forks and swishing water was not our constant state, but that’s who she was. She was a force to be reckoned with, and science appreciated her as default. Zero. When she wasn’t there, I felt like I was missing something. I didn’t know the meaning of the word codependent and if I had, I don’t think I’d have reasoned whether or not you could be codependent on someone you’re not in love with, but I felt lesser without her, and that was terrifying.

But I knew I wasn’t in love with her. I had another friend, and his name was Jake. He moved to our school from out of town, like I had, except he’d lived on a island all his life and so he moved the way the water did. He wasn’t bound by the same constructs as the rest of us and I think that’s why I liked him so much. But I came from upstate Texas and never saw the ocean before we moved out to California, so I was solitary and unmovable. Jake would smile at me in the mornings and I would not allow my lips to flinch in response. I’d jerk my hand back and forth in some makeshift version of a wave and I knew it wasn’t as good as he wanted it to be but I didn’t know what I could do about it. I was restless and confined. I wasn’t like him, not at all.

He caught up to me after school just once, at the end of the third month of the semester. I remember his hand on my arm and how I’d flinched away from it too quickly. By the time I turned around to see it was him, he was looking at the ground, like he’d shied away from the idea of speaking to me, but was in too deep to run away now. At least, that’s what I thought. 

And that’s when he looked up at me with the biggest goddamn smile I’d ever seen on a living human.

“Looks like your shoes are untied, buddy! Careful, you could trip. Say, are you walking to the bus? I could walk with you?”

And damn if I didn’t have my carpool waiting for me.

I paused for a moment, perhaps the longest pause in my early teenage life. I could feel my phone in my pocket, buzzing with Jane’s text message, telling me that her dad was there and it was time for us to go. And I don’t know why I let it buzz, but I did. Leaning down to tie my shoe, I strained my neck to look back up at him, some sort of mangled variation of a smile at my own lips.

“Yeah, I’m talking the bus.” 

The walk from the hall to the bus gave way to the first real conversation I had with Jake English, and it was fleeting and awkward and I’m not sure I said anything besides answer his first question, but by the time the bus dropped me off at the neighborhood middle school that was my stop, I was still smiling, and to this day, I pray that nobody noticed.

* * *

 

Early November I woke up feeling like it was going to rain. I woke up and my stomach was twisting itself into knots the way the the clouds wring themselves out before a rainstorm, bruising their particles into darker clouds and deeper vessels. I could feel bruises bubble up on my arms and knuckles from some unknown, unremembered nightmare and I knew I’d spent the night thrashing around like a thunderstorm. The pillow was damp with my sweat and my head felt heavy, but I couldn’t remember what it was I’d been dreaming about, so I got up and turned the shower on, thinking of rain falling and falling like torrents. It's a wonder I got out of that shower alive.

Early November confined me to long sleeves and gloves to hide my purpling marks from Dave or Roxy or at this point, Jake, who’d taken to saying hello to me every morning like a puppy dog. By midday I’d be sweating, but Roxy only questioned me when it came time for gym and I sought refuge in the shadows, looking for reprieve from the draining sunshine, my hair slicked down across my forehead, not at all how I liked it. She pushed it out of my face and looked up at me with a curious look in her blue eyes, head tilted slightly sideways. 

“Are you trying to drown yourself?”

I was distracted with my efforts to shoot down the sun with a glare, so I didn’t fully understand her. I was obliged to glance her way when her hand messed with my hair, but it wasn’t enough to grab my attention. My head was reeling; I was hot and dizzy and she had clearly noticed. 

She grimaced at the sweat from my forehead that had accumulated on her palm from trying to fix my hair and wiped her hand quickly on her blue gym shorts. 

“Earth to Dirk? Ahoy. Pay attention to me, sailor boy.”

I blinked in her direction, and she unzipped my sweatshirt. “I’m not drowning, and what are you doing?”

“Stripping you so I can take you right here in the school yard. What do you think I’m doing, you nerd, you look like you’re about to pass out.” 

Either the flush that spread across my cheeks and nose shut me up, or the breeze I could feel on my arms did, because I stopped talking. I rubbed my hands over my arms to rid them of perspiration and then sighed, taking in the coolness of jacket-less midday. It was a rush to get my gloves off; the pleather clung to my hands like fingers winding through mine, clingy and intrusive. I peeled them off and stuck them in the pockets of the jacket I’d taken back from Roxy.

She grabbed for my arm, fingers curling around one of the worst of the bruises. She didn’t press hard, but I could feel every one of her fingers around the unmarked skin and winced, just slightly. 

“What happened to you, tough guy?” She tried to joke, but I could hear the note of worry intrude her tone. I pulled my arm away and rubbed at the bruise absentmindedly. 

“Nothing. Don’t worry about it.”

“Hey. Dirk. I’m worrying about it. Your hands too, damn. Did you punch something?”

“No, it’s just a robotics mishap, calm down.”

The silence after a bad lie is comparable to very few things, but it feels a bit like drowning. Like if you could go back and take one more breath before it settles in, you would have, but now that you can’t you’re left to hold your breath as best you can, or else breathe in water and let it fill your lungs with the wet, burning reminder that nobody can see through your chest and between your ribcage, but everyone will see you body when it floats to the surface. 

“Okay, it was robotics.” 

Her voice was quiet, and we were both floating then, just a little.

I told Dave that two weekends before Thanksgiving that I thought it might rain and he laughed at me. There was no anger in that laugh, nothing that intended on making me feel dull, but it did anyway. The anger might have been gone, but there was still something suffocating about having to breathe in and out normally all the time every day, even when brothers laugh and comment on heat waves and Southern California being where seasons go to die slowly and temperately, and even though I lost him somewhere along a quip about the second law of thermodynamics, I smirking obligingly and gave up my argument. 

He didn’t make it to the beach (I wish I could say it was because I was right and that it was raining too hard for him to make it to Santa Monica, but in fact it got into the high eighties that weekend) but I got a call a few hours later, a fast apology that he wouldn’t be there for dinner, but there was food in the freezer and I had money and I could order in and that he’d see me on Monday.

We both knew I was old enough to stay in on my own when he was going to be unreachable, despite what the law says about leaving minors on their own. I had grown and in fact, I was still growing fast. I was far taller than I had been when kids would push me around in elementary school, tall enough to peer over some of them and see the cracks in the sidewalk behind them. I made a habit of that, looking behind people rather than at them, because at least then I didn’t have to look them in the eyes and try to understand them. I knew that 13 year olds were fleeting and time was still passing and we were still hurtling dangerously fast around the sun and that eighth grade wouldn’t last forever. I had Roxy and I had Jake and neither of us moved before high school began so I guess I had Jane too, though I wouldn’t precisely realize that until much later.  

Not until it later, and by then, she had mattered for far too long. 

* * *

 

Eighth grade passed, and soon became something we all attempted to forget. Roxy cut her long blonde hair to a bob over the summer, just below her ears, and I remember that because she sent me photo after photo of the haircut from every angle. I, on the other hand, let my hair grow out from the neat trim I’d kept it in throughout middle school and picked up a bottle of gel once it was long enough to use gel on. It was awful and stiff, but like all new trends, it needed time, practice, and friends that were kind enough not to laugh when I went out looking like I’d decided to join N’Sync. 

The summer tolled on, but as it were, not too quickly. I got a lot of sun that summer, because I took to riding my bike around Los Angeles, or biking to bus stops when the journey I had in mind happened to be too far a trek to make it back home before nightfall. In fact, by the time the school year rolled back around, I had such a tan on my hands that the tops of my knuckles were a dark golden, but the ends of my fingers were still as pale as they had been when the school year let out. 

I burned a lot, too. I burned fast, but it took me a couple weeks to get into the habit of putting on sunscreen every day. So at summer’s start, I’d come home with pink marks where my t-shirts ended and my skin began to uncover, or else strewn across my nose and the tops of my ears like the color had been painted on by a very lazy artist. I never mentioned it, but Dave must have noticed at dinners because I came home to a bottle of aloe vera on my bathroom counter, and when the skin blistered and peeled, there was new antiseptic cream under the sink and more aloe frozen in plastic bags in the freezer.

That was our relationship, that summer especially. Silent, almost furiously so, but perhaps that was more circumstance than anything else. I was gone in the day, even on the weekends, and he was too tired to talk at night. We both had our various degrees of introversion, and his required a glass of scotch (that I don’t think he ever really had the taste for, he always seemed so much happier with a beer in hand) and a closed door to pretend behind. Mine involved the sun and a bicycle pump, but they were variations of the same truth; when life moved fast and demanded so much, we had to be alone with ourselves. And we had to be alone with each other at the same time, so our interactions were delayed. It was almost like playing a very slow game of tag with my brother, waiting for him to notice what I’d done to remind him I was around, and vice versa.

There was only one night that sticks out to me where our paths crossed, and that was the night Roxy showed up on my doorstep after the sun had set. Her bike lay helplessly on it’s side, abandoned on my lawn, and her backpack was strung tight over both shoulders rather than one like it usually was, stuffed to the brim like her eyes, brimming with tears. I answered the door and something on my face must have confirmed that my door was the right door to knock on in the middle of the night, because she pushed right past me into the hallway and continued straight on into my room, shutting the door behind her loudly. 

No one had spoken, but the sounds brought Dave out of his room, empty glass in hand, confused frown on his lips. I closed and locked the entrance, my back turned to him, hoping my nonchalance would lead him from inspecting  the contents of my bedroom, but instead he came straight for me, his voice low.

“Who was at the door?”

“Uh, Roxy.”

I could have lied, but my brain didn’t work so fast under pressure. 

“Lalonde?” He scratched at his head like I was friends with too many Roxys to choose from, or else that he couldn’t place her name, like I hadn’t been friends with her since we moved to California. 

“No, the other one.” My voice had a sarcastic edge to it, but there were nerves there too. I didn’t want to stand here evading my brother, I wanted to go and see what was wrong with my friend. But he kept standing and looking confused and I almost walked past him, but then–

“And she just went into your room, yeah?” He turned to look back, and something in his voice was suddenly so free of uncertainly that it stopped me from ignoring him, or hurrying to end our interaction.

“Yeah, how–?”

“I just got off the phone with her mom, actually. I’ll drive Roxy home later, go, uh. See what’s up.” 

He put his hand on my shoulder and I could feel the blood rushing down to my feet, leaving my face cold and my arms a little tingly, and the feeling almost prevented me from seeing the look on my brother’s face, like maybe he was younger than I thought of him as being, but his perpetual exhaustion and responsibility aged him in my head. Maybe he was overworking himself, maybe I was too hard on him sometimes, and that all creased in between my eyebrows before he had a chance to turn away and disappear back into his room with the door closed and the empty glass still in hand.

 My questions burned on my tongue, but I bit back my curiosity and saved it for my friend who, as it turned out, was lying on my bed with her black sweatshirt drawn all the way up around her pale face, drawstrings pulled tight and tied in a bow near where her mouth probably was. She didn’t look at me when I entered, so I closed to the door and sat down next to her, perching close enough to take the liberty of undoing her little cave and pushing her hood away from her eyes.

When I did, I saw the tears that smeared black makeup across her cheeks, leaving it tracing lines down the side of her eyes to collect near her temples. She closed her eyelids like curtains to shut me out from the rawness that tinted her blue eyes, and when I used my thumb to clear some of the worst of the makeup from her face, her lip quivered slightly. 

Neither of us spoke for a while, but she did open her eyes and sit up after a while. My bed was pressed against the far wall, and so both of us ended up sat with our backs to the wall and our legs stretched out: mine straight in front of me, and hers with her left knee bent and the other straight, her left foot tucked under the straight leg. We sat and we stared at my desk on the other side of the room.

“Hey, Rox?”

“Yeah.”

“What’s up.”

She blew out air through her lips like a horse. “My mom is a bitch.”

Roxy had perhaps the most colorful vocabulary of anyone I had met thus far in my career as a human of the Earth, but she used it sparingly. She was much more likely to say something was “bitchin’” than to call anyone a bitch themselves, and if she did, there was always a note of humor or frustration or dramatics that took away from it’s seriousness, something to lessen the blow of a slur. She was Roxy, she was supposed to be harmless. I had let her in further than anyone else, so maybe I just needed to believe that she was harmless, that she’d never hurt me.

But the way she spoke those words, it was almost chilling. She believed them. And I didn’t consider what Mrs. Lalonde must have done to make her own flesh and bone believe she was bad enough to talk about in a deadpanned voice, as I maybe should have as a friend. I didn’t even bother to ask.

No, I was scared of her. 

“Oh, that sucks.”

“Yeah, it does.”

Half an hour later, Dave knocked on the door to take, as he joked, “the runaway” home. Somewhere between an off color joke of my brother’s about illegal border crossing and Roxy putting her shoes back on and trying not to smile, I asked if they wanted me to come with. Dave shook his head and told me he’d take care of it, and when I looked at Roxy to defend my presence, she wasn’t looking at me at all. 

So I went to bed. 

* * *

I rode my bike a lot in the summer, and I found myself at the Santa Monica Pier some days. The lure of underpriced sunglasses, or perhaps overpriced rides did me in for beachside entertainment, and so I wandered the tourist filled, bustling wooden pathway through the attractions and kept my head down. I had my sights set on the Starbucks that was, in fact, the refuge of most attempting to escape the heat, but one look into the windows of the packed storefront got me feeling slightly claustrophobic, so I wandered instead. 

I wandered with my head down and my hair too spiky. I had my earphones in with some public radio podcast playing something that had been somewhat current when I’d downloaded it but now was just outdated when I thought I heard my name being called in the muddled background. I took one ear out, and heard it again, “Dirk”, ringing like a bell in a voice that was strangely familiar to me. 

And of course it had to be Jake English that I’d see on the water of all places, him in all his purple swim trunks glory, waving to me from the beach below. 

I squinted to spot him with the glare of the sun in my eyes, but sure as hell, I waved back. He smiled and made to call something up to me, but someone else caught his attention, an older woman with the same hair and the same nose and the same dark tone of skin. It felt a little weird standing there watching as they took their family photograph, so I started the trek back up the hill to Ocean Avenue and let the two of them disappear into the sand behind me.

I wouldn’t see Jake until the school year began again, but I did wonder from time to time if he ever looked for me on the pier. 

**Author's Note:**

> Things might not make much sense right now, but that's what multiple chapters are for. Let me know what you think and I'll try to have another, better chapter up soon! xx


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